Father Forgive Them, Except For The "Mormon in America" Bit

Peggy Noonan, "Mormon in America: How Mitt Romney came to give The Speech--and how he did." December 7
David Brooks, "Faith vs. the Faithless." December 7

CANDYLAND! Bright, primary-colored game pieces move across a yummy ice-creamy landscape at the roll of the die, and there's no real competition--except with the outside world, which occasionally makes you come inside and eat vegetables. Noonan, of course, lives there; Brooks drops in to hide whenever the grab for his lunch money gets a little too real. Both kibitzed Mitt Romney's play Friday. Peggers went swoony:

Romney reintroduced himself to a distracted country--Who is that handsome man saying those nice things?--while defending principles we all, actually, hold close, and hold high.

Bobo reached for Junior Ad-Exec Teaches Community College Night School:

Yesterday, Mitt Romney delivered a speech that artfully blended the centrist Meacham and the conservative Neuhaus.

Now, one of the things one learns in trying to write every day--even if by "write" one means "type cranky Letters to the Editor with little thought and less editing"--is that it is impossible--even on Planet Peggy--to take shit like the artificial hoopla over Romney's speech seriously. One may certainly understand it's all bullshit without personally enduring a daily publishing schedule, let alone one as strenuous as Noonan's. But the effort of putting words on e-paper on a regular basis has got to inform you that this The Speech business was pure PR guff, the same way filleting farm-raised trout for a living would allow you to sense a spoiled one without bothering to sniff. Not that it's a surprise that either of these two would shill the thing; I'm just sayin'.

Nor is one surprised when Noonan takes a trumpet solo in the middle of her harp recital:

He had nothing to prove to me regarding his faith or his church, which apparently makes me your basic Catholic. Catholics are not his problem. His problem, a Romney aide told me, had more to do with a particular fundamentalist strain within evangelical Protestantism. Bill Buckley once said he'd rather be governed by the first thousand names in the Boston phone book than the Harvard faculty. I'd rather be governed by Donny and Marie than the Washington establishment.

Easily arranged. Take I-80 west til you get to the Bonneville Salt Flats. You'll get to travel the Indiana Toll Road in the process, so you can celebrate Privatization while you're at it, for a nominal fee.

But Peg, look, in the interests of doing what Willard Mitt didn't--namely, discuss religious differences--Roman Catholics are religious wholesalers. The most important thing to a Catholic is being seen as part of the inventory. They're not real concerned about the crazy guy panhandling down the block, unless he steals a truck. On the other hand, Protestants, generally, and certainly all evangelicals, buy retail. They don't like you readin' the magazines without buying. They're naturally schismatic. They don't tend to excuse doctrinal changes just because a new infallible leader got himself elected. Instead, they just start another One True Church. There are over thirty-five denominations of Baptist Church in this country, without counting the thousands of independent Baptists churches as separate denominations on their own, with they technically are. They'll form a splinter group over the question of whether you can baptize in fluoridated water. Minor questions of faith are major concerns for these people. They can lose half their congregations to some guy who drinks turpentine, overnight.

Which doesn't mean Roman Catholics should go around patting themselves on the back over their tolerance. It means they feel the penalty for early withdrawal, as drilled into young heads, is sufficient to hold off the Minions of Mongo. As I recall, some Catholics turned out to be pretty intolerant of one of their own around the last Presidential election, even though his beliefs were in line with the teaching. Romney doesn't have a "Catholic problem" not because Catholic Republicans are the soul of ecumenicalism; he doesn't have one because he changed his stance on abortion in an effort to get nominated. If "Abortions for some, tiny Ameican flags for others" was inscribed on one of those Holy Pie Plates from Mephzab that form the basis of his religion he'd have a Catholic Problem that'd make him forget his prostate.

(Nooners, by the way, gives us a remarkable Lives of the Saints view of The Speech--the resistance from "some" of the staff, the rough draft in March, the May Day of Decision, the Summer of Indecision, the desire to deliver it "on the ascendancy", the October "Thanksgiving" target date complicated, but not dictated, by the Surging Huckabettes. One thing is clear: with this much campaign mythology behind it--whether true or false or mixed--nobody's more intoxicated by The Speech than that campaign staff which is said to have been so lukewarm about the idea. I've met Tapeheads who weren't so obsessive.)

It's politics, not theology, behind the evangelical "uproar" over Mormonism--which seems strangely to have come instantaneously into play right alongside the Unstoppable Huckabee Iowa Express. This explains why Brooks actually dedicates half his column to being lukewarm about it, for real. After praising Mitt for competently navigating the raging rapids that separate Genuine Mushy Ecumenicalism and Politically-Motivated 'Conservative' Faux Mushy-Ecumenicalism, Brooks says:

And yet, I confess my own reaction is more muted.

And I'm sure there's something in Burke about it, too, but the real reason is that the But I'm Not A Social Conservative 'conservatives' like Brooks are the ones who were burned the worst by the whole Schiavo business, when their delusion about who they'd been sharing a party with since Reagan reached the flashpoint. If Brooks is now concerned about the banana pudding God Romney proposes to dollop onto every courthouse lawn in the Republic, what was he doin' the last thirty years? Is the bull-roaring homo-and-feminist Hater of Falwell and Robinson a better fit?

In fairness, Noonan gets around to this idea in her final graph, though one tries to be careful passing out credit to a woman whose very next sentence may concern the stopped watch the Queen of Sweden gave her in 1874.

I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have.

I dunno...is American really ready to clutch to her Xanax-deadened bosom the theological descendants of a mythologized Western cannibal? Or, for that matter, Jeremiah Johnson?

Happy Birthday

Dalton Trumbo
December 9, 1905--September 10, 1976

Wait, That's It?

"WE welcome a nation's symphony of faith"?

Th' fuck?

WIllard Mitt has had a year, minimum, to write that speech, his "Moment", and it winds up sounding like, take your pick: a) a Wednesday luncheon address to the Jaycees of Greater Ottumwa; b) the guest sermon at a Methodist/Church of Christ Interfaith Sunday; c) the back of a box of Kellogg's Frosted Religious Flakes & Nuts.

Okay, I take that back. For "sermon" read "perfunctory remarks before opening the serving line on the monthly Pot Luck Dinner".

Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God.

The "Elusive Butterfly of Democracy" Theory.

I don't know about you, but had I stopped for a moment before--and I assuredly did not--and tried to figure out just why Willard Mitt Romney was running for President I believe I'd have drawn a blank, apart from the natural villainy that's in all of us. So, again, always trust your first impressions.

Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions.

"As your President, I promise I will continue to pander only to that same set of rabid mainstream Christian extremists I've already sold out every ideal to. Unless circumstances dictate otherwise. Offer void in Utah."

I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers. I will be true to them and to my beliefs.

I'm sorry...I'm having trouble concentrating on your speech and experiencing the sensation of whiplash simultaneously.

Is this what you people have against public education (theoretically, I mean, not the stuff about the coloreds)? That it's generally not permissible to give two diametrically opposed answers to the same question and still get an "A"?

You had a year! You have every consultant untold billions of consulting-firm fees can buy you. And now (ahead of schedule and "against their advice") you tell us not to worry that the Elders of your church will order you to sew preteen vaginas shut across this Great Land of Ours, but if you personally decide that Angels from the planet Mongo have ordered you to wipe Islam violent Islam off the face of the globe you're cool with it?

So lemme ask you: why should we trust a President who's already demonstrated he'll throw as much money as possible at any problem as a principled approach to problem-solving, even when it's his own or his investors' cash he's playing with? "Assume people are stupid, and say 'Jesus' a lot." I'd have given you that advice six months ago for $37.50, plus S&H.

In John Adams' words: ``We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. ... Our Constitution,'' he said, ``was made for a moral and religious people.''

Oh, shit, I left out "Quote the founders at their baronial, kindly-keep-the-peasants-downwind, finest. See Adams, John." Okay, 10% off.

Given our grand tradition of religious tolerance and liberty...

As illustrated by what's been practiced on, and by, my own little enclave...

some wonder whether there are any questions regarding an aspiring candidate's religion that are appropriate. I believe there are.

As illustrated by my tanking in Iowa...

And I'll answer them today.

Well, "answer" in the same sense that my sons are "serving in Iraq".

I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God.

All four of 'em. Faiths, I mean. Four Gods would be an absurdity.

And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims.

Those comical one-liners of Confucius. Those tickle me. Reggae, except the political stuff. The delicious sausages of the Poles. The tasty fried potatoes of the French. As President, I'll wear a Pope hat and take peyote. Did I leave anybody out?

As I travel across the country and see our towns and cities, I am always moved by the many houses of worship with their steeples, all pointing to heaven, reminding us of the source of life's blessings

Right. Whenever I find myself in that small town America Mitt's servants hail from, I inevitably tear up at the sight of a brave Jewish steeple. I mean, Christ, these guys can't avoid saying "Some of my best friends are Negroes" even when they're the Negro.

But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning.

Refresh my memory, willya Mitt?

They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It's as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

No new religions! I've pandered enough, and if I have to eat another rubber knish I'm gonna hurl!

You just knew this was where he was headed, didn't you? "Let us come together as a freedom-loving people and really hate the atheists?" The only surprising thing--okay, not that surprising--is that we've reached a point where this sort of thing passes for public discourse. I don't expect Willard to address the real issues involved. I 'd just like it if someone would either answer the question without tapdancing clogging for an hour, or tell everyone else to go piss up a rope. Anything but Jell-O mold faux-theism. If Romney had pulled a random six items from The Big Book of Really, Really Crackpot Shit Mormons Are Supposed To Believe, Really, and said, "Yes, I believe those, because I'm a Mormon," I'd consider voting for him. That would have shown some character. Kucinich acknowledged seeing a UFO, and that's without believing he'd suffer Eternal Paper Cuts if he denied it. And y'know, just once I'd like to hear someone acknowledge that this sort of Bronze Age mush, rather than being constantly besieged, has been ascendant for thirty years without its having solved anything except the problem of making government seem more noisome and less efficient than it already was, and ought to go back to quietly informing people's lives instead of publicly screaming how desperate they are in the first place. What Mitt Romney will "do as President" is about as realistic a question as what he'll be doing when the Avenging Seraphim fly over Washington D.C. in their flaming Celestial Nash Ramblers*. Why we're all supposed to be listening is the real question.


* What his own father was doing while "The Greatest Generation" was "defeating fascism and vanquishing the Soviet Union."

My New Favorite Professor

IS Dr. James Stripes, and not just because I am totally stealing his comment that Fred Hampton advocated only the same thing Charlton Heston did, with the (as it turns out, fatal) misapprehension that it might apply equally to African-Americans. (This blog, by the way, is always quick to point out that Heston was one of the Hollywood names who marched with Dr. King back when that was not particularly a wise career move.) Rather, it's because his new blog, Patriots and Peoples discusses issues in American history raised by a comparison of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and Schweikart and Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States, a great idea in the first place, and the writing is lively, plus I seem a lot smarter by linking to it, except now I have to stop pretending I know anything about the subject. I would have mentioned it sooner, and gotten to Half-Price Books to find cheap copies, except my toe hurts, and if you think that's a joke, you try it.

To My Knowledge, No One's Yet Called It A 'Hail Mary'

SO Monday my Poor Wife was working away on her class project, the one for the class she's taking, not one she's teaching, and I found myself alone with the remote at the critical 5 PM slot. She was still within earshot, and I am nothing if not dutiful, so she got to listen to a half-hour of local jibber-jabber, except from one station only with no flipping back and forth to catch three-to-six different weather segments, depending on what's happening on the Threat Board. (Local "News" now begins with Weather unless there's a catastrophe of Biblical proportions occurring somewhere other than Iraq, which is firmly affixed to the 5:30 slot. Thus for three days last week we opened local "news" by watching weather radar over Central Texas, and prior to the first storm of the season dumping 3" of fluffy snow on us Wednesday morning we'd spent a weekend watching the pink nimbus of its radar reflection arcing across Minnesota and Wisconsin like we were Aussies in On the Beach.)

Anyway, I started flipping around and landed on Pardon the Interruption, the vaguely closeted ESPN Siskel & Ebert spinoff in which the guy with the second-worse case of the cutes in national broadcasting discusses the day's sports "issues" with the guy with the worst case. I believe you will know, assuming, for some reason, that you care, which one of those is Tony Kornheiser.

And I stuck around because the second story was Sunday's Colts-Jags game (they list the chronology on a sidebar), which had been pretty much ignored by the national press despite its having involved the much-injured but still possibly second-best team-in-the-league defending champs and their divisional rivals and top wildcard team who're one of the most feared clubs in the NFL, and despite the Colts win having all but clinched the AFC South in a season of adversity. And instead the discussion centered on Jacksonville's claim of having been cheated.

The Colts are 9-3 against the Jax since the two were moved to the AFC South in 2002. Remarkably, and against all odds, all nine of those losses have been the result of the Colts, the referees, the League office, NASA, and all the companies that use Peyton Manning as a celebrity endorser colluding. At least according to the Jags. They're one of the toughest outfits in football, but they're the biggest whiners in all of sports. So much so that it is a common bar sport in Indianapolis to name the most outrageous Jags' complaint after their next loss and see if you can approach the reality; I have a standing bet that "Pepper spray in the eye black" will turn up before 2012.

You might suppose that this information would manage to find its way over the Appalachians, even to a professed computerphobe like Kornheiser, but apparently not. They took this stuff seriously, although Kornheiser took off the tinfoil hat long enough to debunk--thanks, Tony!--Jacksonville DE Paul Spicer's mock insistence that Bill Polian had paid off the refs. They proceeded to show two plays from the first quarter where a Colts challenge was upheld (while neglecting to show the actual replays), and one of the Jags' four false starts, which they had blamed on Indy's defense "barking". The segment sorta concluded with Kornheiser pulling the old boxing bromide "You have to knock the champ out" from his sphincter, as though the game had ended in a split decision.

Okay, so, no big deal; aggressive stupidity is very big with Nielsen families, they tell me. But it's Monday night; time for the undefeated Pats to play the Ravens, and Tony Kornheiser to talk over Ron Jaworski for another entire broadcast, lest America actually learn something about the game. And the Ravens beat the Pats for 59: 37, only to lose in the end, and afterwards some of the Ravens go ballistic over some of the calls in the last :44, about which they have maybe one somewhat valid point and are full of some measure of shit on the rest. And so I set up to tape PTI the next afternoon in case my PW is back at the controls, and Lo! and Behold! after two minutes discussing the actual game, and whether Tom Brady's jock tastes like chocolate or is more redolent of peppermints, the third story is on the Controversy, and the sidebar title is "Conspiracy Theory".

The script is irresistible. They don't have to write to it. They view everything through it, all their waking lives.

Which brings us to one Willard Mitt Romney and the groundswell of excitement over "the Mormon speech" he's said to be delivering today. By casual count I have now heard this compared to JFK's "Catholic speech" 137 times, without ever searching it out once; I have heard 84 times that this wasn't his Kennedy speech, 73 of those noting that he'd not compare the circumstances/personalities/cultural import of the two; several dozen explanations of how the speech was planned for later, after he'd won some primaries, but is being moved up because of The Amazing Surging Huckabee, most of those allowing that his advisors were agin' it, but none of them questioning whether his advisors were actually behind the decision to tell the reporter that his advisors were agin' it. I have seen or heard it described as a Make-or-Break speech, the Most Important Event of His Campaign, his "Moment", and "Pivotal"; someone even bothered to wake up Jonah Goldberg, probably figuring that corporate media insanity would be incomplete otherwise.

Romney, by the way, is spending something like $800K per day on teevee *, has now spent more money than any candidate in history to this point **, and has already spent more than all the Presidential campaigns through 1988, adjusted for inflation, combined †. Which has achieved almost 80% name recognition and a make-or-break moment even before literally hundreds of our fellow citizens swarm the church basements of Iowa for their Quadrennial Vote-N-Snack, but a lot of goodwill from that subset of voters who sell television advertising time.

The only thing that justifies the hyperbole is that hyperbole is one of the few things besides eye-catching new packaging schemes and making idiots of ourselves on television that we're still good at. The only thing that justifies all actual discussions of the "issue" in question, rather than the significance of its contrivance, being buried in paragraph 18, is the sensitivity of the sort of Religious Freedom voter who thinks Mormons will burn in Hell for all eternity but would rather not say so publicly.

Still, as we swirl down the drain, if we remember to keep our eyes on a fixed spot we can a) avoid vertigo and b) enjoy some unintentional humor while we're at it. Bob "Pivotal" Novak:

Romney no longer is called the perfect candidate hampered solely by religious prejudice. After a half-hour immigrant-bashing duel with Rudy Giuliani, he looked like somebody who would say anything to be nominated.

Hey, Bob, you ever consider sportscasting?


* true
**also true
† faith based

Happy Birthday

John Davies Cale
born March 9, 1942
(h/t blackdogred)

Slate Quarterly Has A Nice Ring To It, Don'cha Think?

1) Hey, it's nice to see Stephen Metcalf's rebuttal--make that debunking--of that William Saletan series The Negro Cranium: Deficient or Just Subpar? But A) it's fairly damning when you have to call in the adults to clean up your mess; B) it's especially damning when your whole schtick is Up Is Orange, No, Wait, We're Kidding, It's Seafoam; and C) It should have been caught from Saletan's opening sentence. Plus he still has a job. I guess the conclusion is, uh, Ha Ha Ha! You Fell For It! We Never Said Inaccuracy Is The New Accuracy! We Just Don't Give A Shit!

One is tempted to suggest that this is the real face of Saletan's "Liberal Republicanism", except a chimera has no face.

2) Does Hitchcock Get Too Much Credit?

Ans: Yes.

I'd prefer to leave it at that, but should the reader fell compelled to click on the resulting slideshow he or she will learn--SPOILER ALERT!--that in fact Hitchcock did not draw his own storyboards, thereby leading us to the astonishing conclusion that cinema is a collaborative art.

I don't suppose there's any chance they're going to bring in an adult to correct this one, so let's ask the real question: Does Hitchcock get too much credit because people like Andrew Sarris used the Cahiers du Cinema as a blanket justification for their own juvenile tastes, thereby encouraging a generation or two of movie buffs to imagine they were getting some extra value for their Hitchcock movie buck despite the fact that it had nothing whatever to do with what they like about them?

Ans: Yes.

I'll grant you two or three of his late British pics, plus, arguendo, Psycho: you name me another Hitchcock flicker that's better than it should be.

3) If Zep reunites, will they play "Stairway to Headphones"?

It also doesn't help that the lyrics appear to be an index of a confused mind. If, for instance, the lady at the beginning of the song is a fool (she believes, after all, that she can buy a stairway to heaven), then why at the end of this long and winding lyrical road is she shining white light and showing us how everything still turns to gold? Some critics have turned themselves inside out trying to prove that this must be a different lady. Cultural-studies theorists will see this is an "open" text. Industry bean counters will notice that its ambiguity is the key to its popularity.

And the rest of us will have to content ourselves with the free soporifics.

Fer chrissakes, it's Led Fucking Zeppelin. Lyrics? Lyrics are to Led Zep what guar gum is to ice cream. Assuming, that is, that major commercial ice cream producers steal their supplies of guar gum. Lyrics? I thought the point of Led Zeppelin lyrics was that otherwise Robert Plant would have had very little to do onstage.

Okay, they're sonic innovators. They also blazed a path in babydoll shirts for men, and those guitars that are, like, double guitars. If you're embarrassed by people holding flaming Bic lighters aloft and singing along with "Stairway", well, maybe you should be.

Today In History: December 4, 1969

AP/World Wide Photo
It's always nice to see public servants who enjoy their work.

I'VE been trying to do this story justice--okay, justice has nothing to do with it--for long enough now that I'm just gonna give up and let the jolly coppers above speak for themselves. No one's ever gonna do it better.

Fred Hampton was 21 years old when he died. Mark Clark was 22.

There was a big fight last year when a Chicago alderman tried to designate that block of Monroe Street "Fred Hampton Way". The FOP, after all these years, still clings to the idea that Fred Hampton's rhetoric made him a cop killer, and made his killers lawful. I propose a solution: let's take the name and the stain off J. Edgar Hoover off his federal building, and call it auld lang syne.

Can't We All Just Come Together And Shoot Developers?

Bruce Barcott, "Kill The Cat That Kills The Bird?" December 2

I spaced out my mother's medications Sunday--my sister and I alternate weeks filling her pillbox (remind me to tell you about the assisted living/nursing home industry some time, in case you haven't already guessed)--and I flat forgot until five o'clock, about the time I was pulling a roast chicken out of the oven.

So we ate sorta hurriedly and left the wine bottle unopened on the counter, and drove off to the Westside in the dark and the horizontal rain. "Have you seen the Carnival at the (other) end of the street?" my Poor Wife--who'd volunteered to go along thinking I'd let her drive, because I'm blind as a bat at night, and wound up hanging on for forty-five minutes of Death Car VI--asked as I pulled off in the opposite direction. I knew which two viral Christmas lawns she meant. You do, too, probably, assuming you live anywhere in the US of A where they favor lawns. Growing collections of jumbo blow-up Santas and Snowglobes and Bears--a happy-visaged brown bear with his own chimney filling the last available cubic meter of one of the yards was the 2007 addition my wife was anxious for me to catch--are the new obligatory addition to public displays of Podunk taste.

"Yeah," I said. "I wonder how many copies of An Inconvenient Truth they passed around last Christmas?"

Then I added, "Like I should talk, with five florescent tubes burning fourteen hours a day to keep a bunch of tender perennials alive in the basement 'til next May." (Honesty compels me to admit that I didn't say this in order to be honest, but to reinforce the idea of my honesty to my wife, except she knows better, anyway.)

Last August she undertook the care and feeding of her baby brother's menagerie (two cats, one bunny) while his family was on vacation. About mid-afternoon the first day I asked her if she'd forgotten about it. "No, I have to go at night," she told me, and explained that the second cat in the household wasn't actually in the household, but was a neighborhood dumpee they'd taken to feeding and now called their own, but didn't allow in the house because they hadn't yet decided whether to subject it to a lifetime of pain from medieval claw-removal torture like they did the other one, on the grounds that they have small children. Humanitarians. (I happen to believe the real reason is they have furniture of which they're inordinately fond, but then I also believe that a good swat from a cat it has agitated beyond all tolerance is one of the best and swiftest lessons a young child can learn.) And it turned out that their neighbors, with whom they've had quite friendly relations for the decade they've shared a corner of Subdivision Nirvana, were birding enthusiasts, and had begun a war over the cat that had escalated to not-speaking and threats to harm the animal if he killed any birds. So the cat had to be fed in secret. "Tell him to ask if they shoot hawks, too," I said, though I've come to realize my bons mots never really carry the day unless I'm a lot bigger than the other guy. So she carried on the stealth feeding for a week, and last I heard the cat is still associated with them, though his winter quarters were yet to be decided. The bunny owns the garage.

This is not the only sense in which I have a personal stake in Barcott's story (which followed the hung-jury trial of the Galveston birder who gunned down a feral cat).

At the center of it stood Jim Stevenson, unrepentant and sure. “What I did was not only legal,” he told me. “It was right.”

Which, of course, is why he ran like a tweener spotted egging a house.

One Texas birder, a fourth-grade science teacher, suggested that Stevenson be given a medal for his actions.

There's a surprise.

My own suburban space counts more bird feeders (four, freshly filled), birdhouses (five), and drinking sources (three, one winterized) than cats (two, one strictly indoor). We've had as many as four cats, all allowed outdoors to some extent, at one time. We've lived here twelve years. In that time we've had six bird kills, four definitely by one cat and a fifth suspected. The sixth kill is merely attributed to cats; the leavings actually suggested a hawk. I've seen hawks take two birds in flight near the feeders. They've also grabbed a squirrel, a small possum, and a rabbit. The cats have all been more avid hunters of ground game: field mice, voles, and chipmunks. Lucky for us the number of people with a Lifetime Rodent List is relatively small.

So from my personal experience in a decade-long study of developed, mid-continent, new-growth scrublands with a considerable number of cat-hours available to hunt over seed, if desired, birds were only 1.5 times as likely to be killed by a domestic feline as by window glass. Shoot them out, why don'cha?

There's more, of course. That Wisconsin study, which causes Barcott to note

Cat advocates love to attack the Wisconsin study, but the more you delve into the scientific literature, the more the Wisconsin study looks like a red herring used by cat defenders to divert attention from more grounded research.

while ignoring the fact that that particular stinking fish led to a proposal of open season on cats in Wisconsin, hastily withdrawn, but not hastily enough to keep virtual animal-torturer and war hero Jonah Goldberg from sticking his head above his office sandbags long enough to applaud a proposed new avenue for exercising our Second Amendment rights.

In the past decade, at least a dozen studies published in top scientific journals like Biological Conservation, Journal of Zoology and Mammal Review have chronicled the problem of cat predation of small mammals and birds. The takeaway is clear: cats are a growing environmental concern because they are driving down some native bird populations — on islands, to be sure, but also in ecologically sensitive continental areas. At hot spots along the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf Coast, cat predation is a growing threat to shorebirds and long-distance migrants. And as wild habitat becomes more fragmented by human development, even some inland species are under increasing pressure from both house cats and their feral cousins.

Here's the other side of my experience. My wife and I lived for a couple of years in a rented house owned by a guy who'd been seduced by those Make A Fortune In Real Estate Without Using Money infomercials, and he'd bought a couple of places in a speculatively gentrifying area downtown. And while he struggled to find renters he fed the feral cat population in an effort to keep down the rodents. There were six every morning back of the garage, waiting for food. And we had three of our own, who went outside sporadically, so it represented a problem, but we kept feeding them. Within a month we were down to four, then two, then one persistent big guy--the only one you'd let within a foot of your face--who'd obviously begun life as someone's pet. And he, like the others for the duration of our brief acquaintance, would turn up with the most horrific injuries on a regular basis, the result of mating fights, rat bites, accidents in vacant buildings, and who knows what else, until he, too, disappeared. Their lives are brutal. Feeding them prolongs the brutality. Feeding feral cats in coastal areas or on islands isn't tender-heartedness, it's wrong-headed cruelty to the cats, let alone their prey.

Like Stevenson's Texas, my brother-in-law and his nature-loving neighbors live in a rock-ribbed Republican enclave dedicated to squeezing profit out of every available plot of land; so far as I've heard the neighbors haven't threatened to shoot the mayor. Maybe they should study that in Wisconsin.

Which Beer Would You Have A Candidate With?

BY 1968 the United States had been in Vietnam for seven¹, thirteen², fourteen³, eighteen⁴, twenty-three⁵, or forty-eight ⁶ years, depending on when you start counting, but we were only three years into Escalation, which is what we called Surging back when the viral theory of accurate language was imperfectly understood. And we had a sitting President challenged in New Hampshire (how quaint!) by an anti-war candidate, and this at a time when a majority of Americans supported the war and a third of them wanted to go "all-out to win". (By the way, if you imagine this must mean something less that the proposed nuclear annihilation of that portion of the indigenous population of Indochina which had refused to accept Roman Catholicism in the 19th century your faith in human nature is greater than mine. Or than the evidence supports.)

(And for the record, it was support for Johnson's handling of the war--I'm using a lot of parenthesis these days for some reason--and not for the war itself which fell after Uncle Walter told us Tet meant we'd lost, though it had begun falling a year earlier.)


Forty years later a candidate has to have been an opponent of the current quagmire from the start (read: crackpot, traitor, crackpottraitor) to tell the public it once again suffers from Mass Directed Confabulation Syndrome; otherwise one insists that it's all Lyndon Johnson's George W. Bush's fault for an imperfect execution (which lets the public off the hook, since execution is the one thing it could have reasonably expected him to be good at). This despite the fact that this time the public overwhelmingly thinks knows the war to be a mistake, and a disaster, over and above the Moron-in-Chief and the Era of Delirium Tremens he ushered in. Even the guy who was perfectly placed, by virtue of being nowhere in the immediate vicinity when the Resolution passed, and who had every reason to pin the tail on the donkeys who had abetted it--like it was his one chance to win--refuses to do so. All of which makes a certain amount of sense if you're running for the President of Forty Years Ago, but the only explanation for it today is that Money is the antonym of Sense.

Which I didn't mean to spring on you, there, and I trust you were sitting down. It's just that yesterday's Okay Now It's Huckabee! fest (example), predicated on the idea that it potentially could mean something if he does well in a once-totally-ignored straw poll in a state whose second major import, not coincidentally, is straw, made me nostalgic for that Bygone Era--three weeks ago--when It! was Fred Dumbo Thompson. How well I remember Craig Crawford--he's the Olbermann guest who sounds like Bill Clinton with an undisclosed brain injury--informing me that Fred's extraordinary first debate performance, the one where he successfully avoided accidentally setting fire to his own tie, had doomed the Huckabee campaign. Now it turns out that Iowans are increasingly smitten by the way the former Arkansas governor tells that same homily about his preacher over and over. Or at least 24% of the something like 400 who told a voice identifying itself on the phone as a political pollster that they're likely to participate in the caucuses provided there's pie are.

I don't mind telling you I found the news cheering, since I'd begun to suspect that Republicans had gone nuts.

The euphoria was short-lived. Further research (this is why I'm a committed dilettante, by the way) revealed that 9% of respondents told Parents magazine that Rudy Giuliani is the Presidential candidate they'd most trust to babysit their children.

Still, hope springs eternal, and another round of fascinating YouTube debates, with attendant Hey, A Hillary Supporter Got To Ask A Question! scandal, has perhaps hastened the day when we'll choose a Chief Executive by having randomly-selected citizens pick from an onstage selection of luggage. Besides, whoever wins this time will likely be hated right off the bat, thus ending all speculation about when David Broder will write his first "Is the Honeymoon Over?" column.




¹ Kennedy sends combat advisors, beginning military build-up.
² With U.S. backing, Diem announces Republic of Vietnam product roll-out.
³ In the wake of Dien Bien Phu, CIA establishes military mission, protecting the investment, as it were.
⁴ U.S. money and U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group arrive to aid the heroic French struggle. Note that it is only government/military organizations which find the need to specify their Advice constitutes Assistance.
⁵ Despite having been bankrupted through standing alone against Hitler, the United Kingdom in the Pacific Ltd., by this point a wholly-owned subsidiary of Uncle Sammy's Postwar Trans-Pacific Ricebowl, Inc., sends troops into Indochina to preserve the French Empire, the French at the time being otherwise occupied in skedaddling. Bolstered by two-hundred years of the sort of Sahib wisdom that permitted them to look upon the Americans a blithering idiots with a bank account, and unable to raise the cab fare to send their own people, the Brits send mostly Gurkhas, thus endearing themselves to the Chinese.
⁶ The Wilson administration ignores Ho's pleas for a end to French colonialism.

It's Like A Faustian Bargain, But Without The Faust!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - General Electric Co unit NBC Universal has reached an agreement with TiVo Inc to become the first major broadcaster with the right to use the digital recorder company's research and interactive advertising products, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday in its online edition.

The agreement will give the TV concern's networks such as NBC, Telemundo and Bravo -- as well as its NBC owned-and-operated TV stations -- access to TiVo's ratings data, the Journal said.

The deal will be announced as early as Tuesday, the Journal added.

NBC Universal is also planning to use the deal to sell advertisers TiVo products such as interactive tags, which enable a company's name to be seen even if a viewer is zapping through an ad, the Journal said.

YOU probably won't believe this, but back in the Dark Days of Analog computers were sometimes viewed as potential instruments of evil (!), waiting to run Amok; even the poor unassuming bar code was thought of as a precursor to government-sponsored anal probing and mass extermination camps, and people laughed at Soylent Green. Well, I did, anyway, but then I was high, plus I was only there in the first place because some high school friend of my sister's had suggested that if I took her to see it at the drive-in in my (used) Audi LS she'd let me drive her (almost pristine) Volvo, if you know what I mean, and then she wouldn't.

In fairness, people took concepts like "dehumanization" and "invasion of privacy" and "Nazi death camp" a lot more seriously in those days, and almost no one had seen Star Trek and its window into our technotopian future. The idea of a personal computer wasn't even on the radar. Hell, radar hadn't actually been on the radar all that long, now that I think about it. We hadn't yet experienced the joys of efficient, hydroponically-grown tomatoes, let alone realizing how much greater genetically-engineered varieties would bounce. We fed our cattle grain, if you can imagine, and not, well, less-successful cattle.

I'm not sure when this all changed, but I do know that to the extent Bill Gates is responsible we need to re-think our position on schoolyard bullying. I imagine we can also blame Christmas, which introduced Pong and Atari into American living rooms like undetected carbon monoxide, leaving our citizenry too groggy to realize that in a few short years every meal, opera, family gathering, retail shopping trip, theatre opening, bris, or spectator sporting event would occur under a thick blanket of ringing telephones and the loud recitation of one end of the witless conversations they presage. (All of this leaves out my personal complaint about the sort mindless commercial nostalgia for this stuff which posits it as some simpler, purer time, the sort of thing which might cause a professional scribe to quote someone renting hall space to a bunch of chiptone enthusiasts to the effect that "this is their Woodstock". And don't get me wrong. I have the utmost respect for these or any other artists, and nothing worse than benign neglect for their audience; it's the sort of people who say, "This is their Woodstock," I'd like to see eliminated, or at least driven mad by one side of a telephone conversation while they wait in the checkout line.)

Where the hell was I? Oh, so as of January 1 your TIVO will be spying on you not just for its own amusement, but in the service of the General Electric Corporation (NYSE: GE), a move which is not only being applauded in certain circles but lauded as bold and innovative. Thanks to this sort of modern innovation you don't even need to read the teevee listings anymore. If you did anyway, you'd find that over on the actual NBC tonight you can watch The Bionic Woman as updated for the Late Naughts (she's still a crime-busting techno-feminist with nice hair, but now she's considering Opting Out). Or, if you'd rather catch what market research convinced NBC to do with Bravo ("The Arts Network"), tune in for six prime-time hours of Project Runway. Bodes well, huh? Compared to that a little non-consensual anal probing while someone taps out Freut euch des Lebens on a rejiggered Merlin doesn't sound so bad. Maybe NBC could save a little bold and innovative thinking for the Product.

Happy Birthday

Johnny Allen Hendrix
November 27, 1942--September 18, 1970